Top 100 The Ephemeral Quotes
#1. There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.
Gabriel Chevallier
#3. I want each day to last forever . . . It's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past. Even in the midst of a pleasurable outing I'm aware of how ephemeral it is.
Christina Baker Kline
#4. Business and scholarship pass away with the person, but the soul is forever like new. Fame and fortune change with the generations, but the spirit is always the same. Enlightened people surely should not exchange the lasting for the ephemeral.
Zicheng Hong
#5. These parallel universes are not ghost worlds with an ephemeral existence; within each universe, we have the appearance of solid objects and concrete events as real and as objective as any.
Michio Kaku
#6. For the longest time, the way that I had understood 4chan was this idea that the lack of an archive made the content really ephemeral, and it took me a while, but I finally realized that that's just totally wrong.
Christopher Poole
#7. The problem with our art form: it's so ephemeral, and catching performances can be so difficult ... the important thing is what happens at the moment of performance, for the people who made the effort to be there: it lives with them.
Judith Weir
#8. Those swirls in the cream mixing into the coffee? That's us. Ephemeral patterns of complexity, riding a wave of increasing entropy from simple beginnings to a simple end. We should enjoy the ride.
Sean Carroll
#9. Mortal through I be, yea ephemeral, if but a moment
I gaze up at the night's starry domain of heaven,
Then no longer on earth I stand; I touch the Creator,
And my lively spirit drinketh immortality.
Ptolemy
#10. I'll destroy the ephemeral.
Diego
#11. The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much 'relevance'. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.
Edward St. Aubyn
#12. Beyond the ephemeral and the dark stands "a sign from eternity, solemn and mighty, bathed in the radiance of the divine sun of grace and light - the cross. And there [God] hangs, his arms outstretched as if to embrace the entire world in love."42
Charles Marsh
#13. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if it all depended on this particular up or down.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#14. I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use.
Jesmyn Ward
#15. This, however, is sure: nothing is really lost. Any influence for good, no matter how ephemeral, makes its mark: it helps to leaven the loaf of evil: it leaves a loophole, albeit a small one, for a future escape from bondage.
Horace Annesley Vachell
#16. To call the Form [of the Good] eternal is misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#17. Lesson number two: Not only is glory ephemeral, but it also comes at a price. The
Joel Dicker
#18. As an allegorical art, then, photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.
Craig Owens
#19. Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.
Andy Goldsworthy
#20. Al-Qaeda's obituary has been written countless times over the decade. Each iteration has proved to be ephemeral, as the moment has continually shown itself to have a deeper bench than we imagine.
Bruce Hoffman
#21. Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#23. I would love to give you a more in-depth coherent explanation of my view of the soul, and if I had one I would. The soul and my concept of it are as ephemeral as anybody's, and possibly more so.
Joss Whedon
#24. Our true beauty lies in the eyes of the people who love us, who care about us. Beauty is ephemeral, true love is not. Old and wrinkled, or with a hundred extra pounds, you will always stay perfect to the ones who love you.
Priyanka Naik
#25. Luxuries and indulgences were distractions from true greatness, tawdry and ephemeral baubles that dissipated energy that could be directed toward more meaningful and durable accomplishments in the world around him.
Ramez Naam
#26. ...the bittersweet reminder of life's ephemeral pleasures, of opportunities that pass...These experiences would never be repeated and for that I was sad to see them go. But I also relished in the pricelessness of things so unique. That which can be duplicated loses its gold.
Kevin Revolinski
#27. [For the French] time ... is an ephemeral currency and should be spent doing the things that make life worth living.
Debra Ollivier
#28. In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.
Muriel Barbery
#29. Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#30. Few emotions are more ephemeral in the political world than gratitude: appreciation for past favors. Far less ephemeral, however, is hope: the hope of future favors. Far less ephemeral is fear, the fear that in the future, favors may be denied.
Robert A. Caro
#31. Life is ephemeral like the journey of a dew drop. We must not forget to glitter.
Debasish Mridha
#32. People are inherently wary and fearful. What is a person more afraid of, the paucity of their dreams or the satanic magnitude of their nightmares? Poetic inventions containing elements of truth comprise all of our nighttime dreams and ephemeral daydreams.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#33. A cherry pie is ... ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.
Nick Harkaway
#34. The appeal of perfume is that it is at once ephemeral and empowering. It creates a shimmering invisible armor that lingers in a room long after its wearer has gone and infuses our imagination with a subtle power, hinting at a hidden identity.
Mary Gaitskill
#35. It is conceivable that in principle man's motor through-ways resemble the slime trails along which are drawn the gathering mucors that erect the spore palaces, that man's cities are only the ephemeral moment of his spawning
that he must descend upon the orchard of far worlds or die.
Loren Eiseley
#36. around. You can use the three-hole or five-hole stitch, or make up your own version. Some artists I know have worked with take-out menus, junk mail, fliers left on their car windshield wipers - it is fun to take ephemeral materials
Esther K. Smith
#37. The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.
Carl Sagan
#38. It's the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful.
Yoshida Kenko
#39. What I'm trying to do now in my life - not just with the building, but with everything - is to construct things that will have enduring qualities, and won't just be ephemeral flashes in the pan.
Sylvester Stallone
#40. It struck me tonight how music mirrors life. Fleeting ephemeral moments, made up of beauty, sadness, joy, hope and despair. Melodies which are written in both major and minor keys. Flowing and fleeting. You can't hold onto it, or keep it from changing. Our emotions possess the evanescence of a note.
Virginia Burges
#41. Life is ephemeral; each moment passes quickly, a blur of color on a fast moving subway car. There and gone and all we are left with is the imprint of what once was.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
#42. The appearance was misleading- human dreams; rubbish heaps abundant yet ephemeral sudden and splendid, only to wilt and perish
Jonathan Safran Foer
#43. Television is ephemeral, a fact that some will find reassuring. But earthlings will continue to pump the kilowatts into the ether. And eventually, when those signals have washed over a few hundred thousand star systems, someone may notice.
Seth Shostak
#44. The palimpsests of molecules need not be overwritten, for machines make once-ephemeral words persist: they collect in gutters; they pile up and require sweeping; they hang in air like morning fog.
Dexter Palmer
#45. Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
Twyla Tharp
#46. In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality ... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
George Santayana
#47. What Snapchat said was if we try to model conversations as they occur, they're largely ephemeral. We may try to write down and save the really special moments, but by and large, we just try to let everything go. We remember it, but we don't try to save it.
Evan Spiegel
#48. While it is all very well to distinguish happiness that is transient from that which is lasting, between ephemeral and genuine happiness, the only happiness it is meaningful to speak of when a person is dying from thirst is access to water.
Dalai Lama
#49. He said that love was an emotion contra natura that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#50. In the deep dark silence, my mind dances with the moonlight and feels the joy of this precious ephemeral life.
Debasish Mridha
#51. One of the most ephemeral and important things is atmosphere and tone and it's very hard to put your finger on what creates that.
Julia Leigh
#52. Say no to an ephemeral, superficial and throwaway culture, a culture that assumes that you are incapable of taking on responsibility and facing the great challenges of life!
Pope Francis
#53. No empire lasts forever, no dynasty continues unbroken. Some day, you and I will be mere legends. All that matters is whether we did what we could with the life that was given to us.
Krishna Udayasankar
#54. Your self-image is as ephemeral as the play of light dancing on the surface of the water.
Mooji
#55. Maeterlinck says that compared with ordinary truths mystic truths have strange privileges they can neither age nor die. Beauty is eternal and ugliness, thank God, is ephemeral. Can there be any question as to which should attract the poet?
Florence Earle Coates
#56. I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing.
Isabel Allende
#57. Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?
Julia Kristeva
#58. Sound is ephemeral, fleeting, but some sort of a physical manifestation can help you hold on to it longer in time. I'm sure of this; I've always thought the sound that you make is just the tip of the iceberg, like the person that you see physically is just the tip of the iceberg as well.
Yo-Yo Ma
#59. Before the discovery of these [underwater] vents, all life on Earth, the key to life on Earth, was believed to be the sun and photosynthesis. But down there, there is no sun, there is no photosynthesis; it's chemosynthetic environment down there driving it, and it's all so ephemeral.
Mike DeGruy
#60. Heaven has not learned of my arrival, and my departure will not in the least diminish it beauty and grandeur. I will sleep underground, for us ephemeral mortals, the only eternity is the moment and drinking to the moment is better than weeping for it.
Omar Khayyam
#61. The ephemeral nature of live performance is the part I love most - it's a monk's sand painting, carefully constructed, then wiped away in an instant.
Rosanne Cash
#62. A pleasure that is ephemeral brings no true satisfaction to any man. How miserable must be the lives of those folk who labor so hard for something that once gained they must work even harder to keep. They
Seneca.
#63. [A digital snapshot] is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical.
Geoffrey Batchen
#64. Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.
Mira Bartok
#65. I reply with a letter as brief as his: 'My brother, after my first battle the only thing I now worship is the sun, a star that represents death's constancy. Beware of the moon, which reflects our world of beauty. It waxes and wanes, it is treacherous and ephemeral. We will all die some day ...
Shan Sa
#66. I think probably the thing I'm worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I'm often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And I can't. I would die. There's no way I could write a column.
Daniel Alarcon
#67. Krishna says meditate and you'll see the various ephemeral worlds, the various ephemeral beings, all of them going through the same thing; some are rich, some are poor, some are more knowledgeable, some are less knowledgeable - in countless myriad universes, forever.
Frederick Lenz
#68. It occured to her that pleasure, no matter how deep, was a ghostly, ephemeral thing. Love might make the world go round, but she was convinced it ws the cries of the badly wounded andf deeply afflicted which spun the universe on the great glass pole of it's axis.
Stephen King
#69. And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all share, according to our strength, our needs or our desires.
Remy De Gourmont
#70. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.
W. Somerset Maugham
#71. Generally speaking, the people who come to work at Snapchat believe in personal growth. It's part of why Snapchat's stories are ephemeral, because you will be a different person tomorrow.
Evan Spiegel
#72. What Sri Krishna is saying, is that it's a terrible mistake to believe that this life we lead is real. Obviously it's real, but it doesn't last very long in its realness. It's very ephemeral and to mistaken the forms of life, the shapes that life takes, for reality, is not wise.
Frederick Lenz
#73. As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.
Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind ...
William Butler Yeats
#74. I am not interested in the ephemeral - such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.
Thornton Wilder
#75. My weakness ... is architecture. I think of my work as ephemeral architecture, dedicated to the beauty of the female body.
Christian Dior
#76. Everything is conceptual, designed and created by man to differentiate between the eternal and the ephemeral.
Gian Kumar
#77. So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing.
Tony Kushner
#78. Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois , meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life.
Allan Bloom
#79. As for theatre, there's ups and downs to everything. Theatre is ephemeral. But that is part of its charm because you can always say the production was better than it was.
Clive Barker
#80. Success is very ephemeral. You depend entirely on the desire of others, which makes it difficult to relax.
Eva Green
#81. Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living.
Nancy Mitford
#82. The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
A.S. Byatt
#83. We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused
in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible.
Edgar Allan Poe
#84. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains.
Nikola Tesla
#85. And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually..
Jimi Hendrix
#86. Better a thousand times even a swiftly fading, ephemeral moment of life than the epoch-long unconsciousness of the stone.
Edwin Way Teale
#87. Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.
Stephen Jay Gould
#88. On the one hand, our minds try to probe the ephemeral reality of the quantum world; on the other, we talk, think, and act in a language adapted for discussing trees, rocks, and automobiles
as well as poetry and emotions.
F. David Peat
#89. Acting is ephemeral. You can't hang it on a wall. You can't throw it off. And you can't bring it out of a closet. It's there one night and it's gone the next, at least with stage acting anyhow.
Charles Durning
#90. The movies have never been a big deal to me. The movies are the movies. They just make them. If they're good, that's terrific. If they're not, they're not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature, and a more ephemeral medium.
Stephen King
#91. Like the wide hollows of eyes marked in cathedrals of stone that left me half-perplexed as a child. A self-portrait of an innocent in this organic of ephemeral societies. Then I know I will be able to flourish viciously. That's the trouble with remembering. You begin to wish.
Abigail George
#92. My flower is ephemeral," the little prince said to himself, "and she has only four thorns to defend herself against the world. And I have left her on my planet, all alone!"
That was his first moment of regret. But he took courage once more.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#93. Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.
Stefan Zweig
#94. Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material ... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
Brian Eno
#95. It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about.
Jane Smiley
#96. He and all his race showed small and ephemeral against the background of such immeasurable fullness.
C.S. Lewis
#97. Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure as he is inflated by success. He is able to fully live his experiences in the context of a vast and profound serenity, since he understands that experiences are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them.
Matthieu Ricard
#98. In the theater, everything is ephemeral. Everything is almost weightless and without a very clear definition of how you made it.
Rafael Vinoly
#99. With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.
Mary McCarthy
#100. We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.
Wendell Berry
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